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Since the sixteenth century, artistic anatomy – a branch of medical science subordinated to the Fine Arts – has understood itself as a comparative investigation halfway between forensic dissection and the analysis of classical art and live bodies. Its teaching was first instituted in Italy by the 1802 curriculum of the national Fine Arts academies, but underwent a drastic transformation at the turn of the century, as the rise of photography brought about both a new aesthetics of vision and an increase in the precision of iconographic documentation. In this article I will attempt to provide a history of the teaching of this discipline at the close of the nineteenth century within the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, with a focus on its ties to contemporary French practices. Drawing on archival materials including lesson plans, letters and notes from the classes of the three medical doctors who subsequently held the chair (Gaetano Strambio, Alessandro Lanzillotti-Buonsanti and Carlo Biaggi), I will argue that the deep connections between their teaching of the discipline and their work at the city hospital reveal a hybrid approach, with the modern drive towards live-body study unable to wholly supplant the central role still granted to corpses in the grammar of the visual arts.
Throughout the history of European painting, skin has been the most significant surface for artistic imitation, and flesh has been a privileged site of lifelikeness. Skin and flesh entertain complex metaphorical relationships with artefacts, images, their making and materiality: fabricated surfaces are often described as skins, skin and colour have a longstanding connection, and paint is frequently associated with flesh. This book considers flesh and skin in art theory, image making and medical discourse and focuses on seventeenth to nineteenth-century France. It describes a gradual shift between the early modern and the modern period and argues that what artists made when imitating human nakedness was not always the same. Initially understood in terms of the body’s substance, of flesh tones and body colour, it became increasingly a matter of skin, skin colour and surfaces. This shift is traced in the terminology of art theory and in the practices of painting, as well as engraving, colour printing and drawing. Each chapter is dedicated to a different notion of skin and its colour, from flesh tones via a membrane imbued with nervous energy to hermetic borderline. Looking in particular at works by Fragonard, David, Girodet, Benoist and Ingres, the focus is on portraits, as facial skin is a special arena for testing and theorising painterly skills and a site where the body and the image made of it become equally expressive.
Valverde de Amusco, Historia de la composition del cuerpo humano, 1556, engraving. faithfully if one sees it act through the veil in which it is covered. The more an artist is instructed on anatomy, the more this veil will be transparent for him.’3 Stressing the significance of expert guidance, Sue justified his own position and underlined the significance of artistic anatomy. In doing so, he heavily drew on the rhetoric of transparency that was highly prominent during the Enlightenment and which gained political urgency during the pre-revolutionary period. At the same
correspondent and member of the Institut de France the official voice of art criticism, Ingres failed to make use of appropriate painterly techniques to breathe life into his female nude. Evidently, the critic did not wish to see a flat surface in a painting, but the illusion of a three-dimensional body of blood and flesh. Assuming the procedures of artistic anatomy would be applied, Landon expected the artist to allude to the interior structure of the body, using light and shade to produce a sense of relief. Ingres made no such attempts, yet the painted body still prompted
’s physical interior. In both anatomical texts and images, the skin often becomes a symbol for the practice of anatomy and its way of gaining knowledge through dissection; indirectly however skin also points to anatomy’s conundrum of understanding the living body by studying the corpse. In the practices of artistic anatomy, the skin’s role remains especially ambivalent, as it hides immediate access to the interior while being the medium and instrument of its revelation. Skin, the body’s tegument, is often conceived as a veil (and vice versa), the physical or symbolic
that it does in the Grammaire, as Blanc aligned colour and racially defined skin colour, and does not wish the ‘primitive character’ of races, nor the primitive colours to physically mix. This is a far cry from Jean-Joseph Sue’s 1797 Essai sur la physio gnomonie des corps vivans. As I have shown in my chapter on skin colour, this tract, written in the aftermath of the French Revolution and during the short period of abolition of slavery (1794–1802), a state not yet re-gained in all French colonies by the time Blanc wrote his Grammaire, is the first artistic anatomy
), Ancient Lives, New Discoveries: Eight Mummies, Eight Stories (London: British Museum Press). Wells, C. and Maxwell, B. M. (1962), ‘Alkaptonuria in an Egyptian mummy’, British Journal of Radiology 35, 679–82. Wilkinson, C. (2010), ‘Facial reconstruction-anatomical art or artistic anatomy?’, Journal of Anatomy 216 (2), 235–50.
rendering of the human physique came to them naturally. The modern artist however, with no such models at hand – and the degenerate physique of the models in art academies was subject to particular ridicule and critique – had to study anatomy in search for the ideal physique. 115 116 Fleshing out surfaces This situation contributed to the rise of artistic anatomy during the last decades of the Ancien Régime. Efforts to reform art training at the Académie royale under the aegis of the Comte d’Angiviller, since 1774 the Directeur général des Bâtiments du Roi, aimed at a
incarnated by the male academic life model and the nudes drawn from it, and reinforced by the neoclassical ‘beau ideal’ – was both reasserted and compromised in this venture. Neoclassical ideals and a world of brownish people Camper was not the only anatomist who spoke to this newly foregrounded representational task. In 1797, during the period he was lecturing on artistic anatomy in a theatre installed at the Louvre, Jean-Joseph Sue (the younger), 163 5.6 164 Fleshing out surfaces published an Essai sur la physiognomonie des corps vivans, considérée depuis l
these works to the repressed history of Austria’s involvement in Nazism, of which they perform a subtle critique. The naming of works like anna-tommie provides one clue to such sources. The medical institutions of Vienna ( with which Jürgenssen’s father was professionally connected) have long been associated with anatomical modelling – Birgit Nemec, surveying Viennese anatomical collections, writes of ‘the vivid and well-known local tradition of artistic anatomy for which Vienna was praised’. 85 The